How to repair a broken GRUB in Ubuntu?

Aug 28, 2017 • Jaysinh Shukla

Background story

Yesterday, I was having some free time after lunch. I decided to complete a long term plan of checking the compatibility of few Freedom Operating Systems with my workstation. From this list, I decided to check Trisquel OS first. Trisquel is freedom clone of world-famous OS Ubuntu. The simplest option was to prepare a live USB drive and boot the Trisquel from it. I inserted the USB drive and instructed the Gparted to format it. Bang! That simple step ruined my entire Sunday evening. Instead of formatting my USB drive, I mistakenly formatted the boot partition! Without putting any extra measures, I formatted my root partition which is also a type FAT. I was lucky enough to identify that I have formatted the partition from my SSD and not the USB drive. After taking advice from the people of ##linux I found, I will not be able to re-boot because the GRUB is lost. In this post, I will describe the steps I followed to restore the GRUB.

Procedure of restoring the GRUB

Using GUI utility “Boot-repair”. This is the simplest step to follow first. Unfortunately, I was not able to fix my GRUB using this method.

Boot from a live operating system, mount the infected boot partition and perform the steps of restoring the GRUB. Since I identified the problem at an early stage, I didn’t restart my system until I was sure that nothing is broken.

Last is to run the steps of restoring the GRUB from the command line if you haven’t reboot your system after formatting the boot partition. I will describe the steps of restoring your GRUB using this method in this post.

If you had rebooted and are unable to start the system then I will request to follow the steps described at How to geek post rather than continuing here. If you are using Legacy BIOS rather than UEFI type then this post might not work for you. To identify which type your system has booted with, follow this steps.

So let’s start!

Identify the type of your boot partition: You can use GUI utilities like GParted or any other of your choice. The boot partition is the very first partition of the drive you are using for booting your operating system.

In my case, it is /dev/sda1. This partition should be either FAT32 or FAT16. If it is anything other than that you should format it to FAT version of your choice.

If there is any error, I will advise to not move further and try other options I mentioned above for restoring your GRUB.

Finally, replace the UUID of the formatted partition: Find the UUID of your boot partition. Once you format the partition, the UUID of the partition is changed. You have to update the new UUID value at /etc/fstab file. Use below command to get the latest UUID of your boot partition.

sudo blkid /dev/sda1

Copy the value of UUID which is between the double quotes.

Open the /etc/fstab file with your desired editor and update the value with the existing UUID of /dev/sda1. I am doing this procedure using the vim editor. You can choose any editor of your choice.

sudo vim /etc/fstab

You will require the root privileges for writing to this file.

We are done! Now when you will run sudo ls -l /boot/efi, you should able to identify the files beneath that directory. It is time to confirm by rebooting your system.

Vote of Thanks!

I would like to thank ioria and ducasse, member of #ubuntu at Freenode, who invested a great amount of time to guide me in fixing this problem. #ubutu has great members who are always willing to help you.

Note: While mentioning the GRUB in this post, I actually mean the GRUB2.